This Should Turn Outby Tom Snarsky

Ariadne has hung herself. She cannot fall from Earth
undifferentiated as a concept of tired Nature.
Again and again the “nows” are monstrously
indeterminate, the communication swarms,
the square deceptively deviates from straight lines,
and hieroglyphics presuppose a prisoner glimmering
with dew. The level areas of the even plain of Death
may, in fact, be after death: the entire world is an egg.
Consider her whole body, wandering to a widely-
wandering possibility. What can be meant within
intuition? How much more exemplary love seems,
replete with sharp roughness. We see thunderbolts,
rain, and the beginnings of Time itself. Leveled off,
the “nows” get shorn of distortion, dissolved in that form
of a broken Earth. Habitus lifted itself up and in its lightness
lifted acorns and wild strawberries, a pure sequence of “nows.”

We could be criticized for unrolling the Etruscan divination
books, but if the world can be lit up, then the child-
player can only win. We feel fog at night, we are
ennetted as we go, we feel every crawling as resistance.
Acts are fractional numbers: the charity of Joan of Arc,
so large, mortal in all its parts. We have deferred
transparency. No doubt her words depart
like a banqueter sated with life: even the historian
understood the analogy. The terrors of war
bore and open only ocular ways of ascertaining, aloof
from all such rubbish as positivity, novelty, good sense, love.
Matuta scatters rosy dawn through the investigations,
and spatiality becomes orgiastic. The eye is an implicated light,
the ear a possible sound. We see what we are after.

I am traversing death, a dramatization coextensive with the world.
Now I will explain the fracture, under the same sky.

Source Texts:Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (tr. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson), On the Nature of Things by Lucretius (tr. Walter Englert), and Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze (tr. Paul Patton). After “The Smile on the Face of a Kouros” by William Bronk.

Tom Snarsky is a Noyce Teaching Fellow at Tufts University, MA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Unbroken, Maudlin House, After the Pause, Shadowtrain, and elsewhere. He lives in Braintree, MA.